Science as a Map of the World

While the constructionist depiction of science as just one among many crafts which man engages in is clearly extreme and absurd, the principles which underlie such a claim cannot simply be swept under the rug and ignored. Science, as well as scientific knowledge is a largely man made construal of nature rather than some mirror of reality which the scientists “unearth.” Where the constructivists went wrong is in not acknowledging the manner in which reality strongly constrains such construals. Yes, we can only begin to reason about reality once a contingent and corrigible classification scheme and fundamental assumptions is in place, but this does not change the fact that there is an objective reality which such schemes are about. While there may be no one, True, God’s-eye conceptual scheme available from which to view this objective reality, the very fact that there is an objective reality to which all conceptual schemes refer entails that some conceptual schemes are better than others.

Bodily Motion and Human Action

In his book The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle asserts that the basic constitutive rule by which social facts are created is of the form “X counts as Y in C” where X is a brute physical fact, Y is the social fact and C is the conditions in which X counts as Y. In this post, I will describe the manner in which this rule functions in order to create various human actions (Y) out of one and the same mere bodily movement (X) within different contexts (C).